


Hide Me Away

by illwynd



Series: Hide Me Away and Find Me Again [1]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Community: norsekink, M/M, Mpreg, Sibling Incest, Unexpected Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-05
Updated: 2012-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-15 17:49:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 6,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/529985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is not the first time Loki has been pregnant, but this time everything is different. And maybe this time he's going to need some help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written to fill a [Norsekink prompt](http://norsekink.livejournal.com/3231.html?thread=5815967#t5815967) that requested Jotun!Loki giving natural birth.

It is not the first time. 

It is not the first time, but given everything that is different, it may as well be. When last he was pregnant, it was not on Midgard and it was not with Thor’s child. And he was not yet aware of his own nature. He has blurred and distant memories of birthing the eight-legged foal Sleipnir in a wild grassy field. He remembers, as easily as if he were recalling a story told to him by another, bringing forth the long serpentine form of Jormungand from his own body, and touching the soft blood-slicked fur of Fenrir to hear the wolf-pup’s first yips, and cradling the infant Hel in his weary arms. He remembers the pain, and his own smile. That was a different age, a different place. He was so different then. But some things do not change. 

Here on Midgard, knowing that the child that swells his belly is no monster but instead the offspring of his own beloved brother, he still feels the same pull calling him away. For a time he resists it; he has hidden from all others for months to keep secret his condition, and it has been simple enough to keep away from prying eyes either by deception or simple evasion. He supposes, knowing what he knows now, that perhaps this is normal among the Jotun. Perhaps they hide themselves away seeking safety and concealment in the dark of some lone cave when they prepare for the arrival of their children. Or perhaps it is just him—he has rarely been given reason to entrust his weakness to others’ hands, after all. This, he suspects, is at least part of the truth. 

He thinks about many things as the child grows inside him; he has plenty of time. He thinks about his future, his past, his family, his life. He thinks about the realms he has known, and how strange it is to be on Midgard, fighting his brother and his allies at every turn. When he thinks of the Avengers, he laughs at the thought of what they (paranoid as they are) must suspect at this absence, and idly in the back of his mind he wonders whether he can turn their fears to his advantage… but later, when it is all done. He tries not to think of Thor. Will he find panic in his eyes when Thor discovers (as he must, eventually) that their most recent frantic, secret union resulted in a child? Or anger and hurt that Loki did not allow him to be there, to protect him when the time came? He wrinkles his nose at either thought. It is complicated. Thor does not do well with complicated. 

As the time draws near, he finds that he wishes to spend his days in his Jotun form, and he finds that the urge to escape to safety strengthens by the hour until he cannot resist it any longer. He abandons the apartment he has been living in, bringing only money (he has learned that on Midgard, large quantities of money are almost a form of magic all their own) and a few personal items, and flees. He keeps to small towns as he goes, feeling somehow overwhelmed by cities, by the masses of humans, the sweeping height of the buildings, the roar of machines and engines. And most of all, by the funk of strange and vile odors—refuse and burnt oil and old vomit and chemical fumes—that he is suddenly sensitized to, that turn his stomach violently where once he would barely have noticed. He flees, traveling by bus and by rented vehicle and by magic and on foot, always making sure he leaves no trail (on paper or otherwise) for anyone to follow. He stops when he can wait no longer, and he pays for a month’s worth of lodging in advance, giving the woman at the desk firm instructions that he is not to be bothered for any reason. He does not realize until he sinks wearily to the bed and notices the pad of paper emblazoned with motel logo and address that he has come to the very place where Thor landed during his banishment. New Mexico. He laughs weakly at the knowledge and cranks the A/C as cold as it will go.

By the end of the next day, he has turned the room into a nest. The king-size bed is comfortably strewn with soft blankets. The television murmurs and casts icy blue light across the room (he has found that, when turned to an appropriate channel, it suits his eyes much better than the horrible fluorescent hotel lamps). There is a pile of food and drink over by the mini-fridge and microwave. A box of clean cloths and medical supplies spirited out of the closets of a nearby hospital. A basket of clothes and other things he will need for the infant—these he went out personally to acquire, amusing himself by appearing as a roundly pregnant human woman when he entered the store and receiving no undue attention for it, though he did receive a few kindly inquiries. “Soon,” he had answered with a grin.

*

He spends the next few days reclining in the nest he has made, feeling the slow depth of his breathing and the movement of the child inside him. Waiting. It is not the first time, and he is aware that each birth is different. There is a wide mirror on the wall across from the bed, next to the television, and as he eyes the blueness of his skin in the reflection he wonders if birthing will come easier in this form. He wonders if there will be pain. He hopes there will be no difficulties. He sleeps much, in preparation, though his belly has grown large enough that he can barely find a comfortable position even among the multitude of pillows and blankets. He keeps one arm protectively against his own abdomen. 

When he sleeps, he drifts in and out of dreams. They are more vivid than he is used to—not since he was a child has he dreamed like this—but they are also more fleeting. He dreams of the cold dark of Jotunheim and he dreams of the flash of white light that blotted out all vision when the Bifrost was broken. He dreams of his own youth, though in those dreams sometimes, oddly, he walks as a small, hesitant Frost Giant through the halls of Asgard, frightened and alone, peering at that world of light with his red eyes. He dreams of the feel of Thor’s heated body under his own, and in these dreams he is sometimes not even certain if they begin by trying to murder each other or if it begins with his brother’s lips on his face, enthusiastic for all that he will return to denying this moment by the time it is over, and when these dreams end he practically sobs at the loss. Sometimes he also dreams of his life now, on Midgard, and in those dreams he hears the sound of his laughter, quiet and echoing, and the sound of his voice when he meets his enemies, and the feel of his own boundless, injured pride. And sometimes he dreams of the child he will have, and he dreams of what it will be, a tiny creature with ice-pale skin and an Asgardian heart, an orphan of all worlds no matter if Loki stands by its side through its life, yet a child of princes and the dearest thing he can imagine. When he wakes from these dreams he is shaking, and he cannot stop himself from padding around the small room, tweaking the curtains more tightly shut, checking the locks of both metal and magic that seal the door, splashing cold water on his face in the bathroom sink to wash away the sheen of terror-sweat.

*

One morning when he wakes he finds he is reaching for the grimy white-plastic telephone on the nightstand before he even realizes why. The wait, the anticipation, the worry—it is driving him nearly crazy, and there is no one he can talk to for reassurance. Who could he possibly trust? Few enough know his true form, fewer still know its capabilities, and those few who would not take the opportunity to harm him would still make use of the chance to humiliate him.1 But he has, without conscious thought, already chosen his confidant. Years before, when he had first fallen to Earth, he had sought out the mortals that Thor had befriended. He had meant it in malice, and he had indeed used them to his own ends on more than a few occasions, but in part it had merely been comforting—some connection to his brother when he would never again stand next to him as anything other than bitterest enemies if indeed he ever saw him again. So the number under his fingers belongs to Darcy, who was at least mostly harmless (when deprived of her taser) and seemed to take the strangest events in stride, at least after a certain amount of blubbing and blinking in confusion.

“Loki? Thor’s evil brother Loki? What… what are you doing? Why are you calling me?” She says when she answers her phone on the third ring. 

They hadn’t exactly been friends. But he had never done anything specifically to harm her, and he had grown rather fond of her in his own way during their few interactions. “Please, Darcy. I must ask a favor of you. I am in need of… well, in need of company. I have no one else to whom I can turn. Will you come see me?” He hears the pleading note in his own voice, plays it up even more, hoping to tug at her heartstrings. “This is not a trick, I swear on my life. I cannot tell you why I am asking you to come, and you must promise not to inform anyone else, but I am desperate, and you are the only person who can help.”

There is silence on the other end of the line.

“And I will pay you,” he adds. There is, of course, more to it than this. He gives her a multitude of reasons as to why he would not be lying and why he is at the moment no danger to her at all and somehow convinces her of his sincerity, but he feels that the offer of money is really what does it. It is easy enough to arrange for the payment (large enough to appeal to her base desires as a starving student, small enough not to attract interest from anyone who might be looking) to arrive in her account the same day, as proof of his good faith. 

He is only faintly surprised when she knocks on the door of his room sometime after nightfall. 

*

1. _For instance, he can do nothing but shudder at the thought of what Tony Stark would say—even the idea of the phone call does not bear considering. “I, Loki, the villain who has ruined several of your silly metal suits and even more of your evenings and interrupted your attempted seductions of your teammate with my brilliant plans at achieving world domination and general mischief, am pregnant and request your aid… Hello? Hello?."_


	2. Chapter 2

“Hello, Miss Lewis,” Loki says, standing back to let her enter, the blast of fading daytime New Mexico heat from outside washing across his skin making him vaguely uncomfortable. 

Darcy glances suspiciously past him at the chaos of the room. Then her eyes snap back to him. “This place looks like my first year dorm room.” 

When the door is closed, he lets the illusion of his usual appearance fall and sinks to the edge of the bed, letting her see him as he truly is. 

Darcy gasps. “Whoa. You’re blue.”

He nods and leans back against the pillows piled up against the headboard, despite his impulse to guard himself in the presence of another. 

“And… wait, are you…? I know you can’t be pregnant, because you’re a guy, but you really look pregnant. Just sayin’.” Darcy grins a little and pushes her glasses up on her nose, seeming to expect that this is all a joke, or maybe an illusion.

“That’s because I _am_ pregnant. I’m a Frost Giant. These things are a little different for us,” Loki says patiently.

“So who’s the lucky guy? Or, er, girl, I guess?”

Loki frowns but does not answer. 

“Okay, you don’t want to tell me. That’s fine. So why did you call me? Why didn’t you just… go to a hospital or something?”

He raises an incredulous eyebrow at her. “Like this? I’m sure they would know exactly how to deal with that. And I imagine it would involve restraints and copious blood and tissue samples. No, sorry, not interested.” He smiles briefly, showing her his teeth, but the expression quickly fades. “And strange as it sounds, you were the only person I could think of in this realm who I could trust not to betray me.”

“Thanks, I guess. Having the least trustworthy person _ever_ consider me trustworthy, that’s something to put on my resume,” Darcy mutters. As he watches, she wanders around the room, scuffing her feet across the rust-colored carpet. She finds the basket of baby clothes and things, pokes through it cautiously as if she expects it to explode. Instead she finds a tiny knitted blanket in pastel green, edged in brown runes sewn onto the binding. “Wow. You’re actually not screwing with me, are you?”

“No, I’m not,” he says. “The child is overdue by a few days, I think. I have nowhere to go, no one who can help me, no one who knows what I should do any better than I do. I would at least like to have someone to talk to.”

He meets her gaze as she looks at him with a series of expressions flickering across her face. He sees sympathy there, and doubt, and confusion. 

“Well, then. Let’s talk,” she says after a moment, casually plopping down onto the armchair between bed and window.

The corners of his mouth tilt up in a tiny smile. He does not want to admit it, but the creeping anxiety that had woven itself into every cell of his body is fading now that he has someone with him. It feels good to let it go. Godly endurance or not, he is exhausted. He has been exhausted for the whole length of his journey... and maybe he had already been exhausted when he began it. 

*


	3. Chapter 3

Darcy is staring at him, her mouth quirked. They have been talking for hours—occasionally he lets his eyes close for a few minutes and they both fall silent, and sometimes when he wakes from his brief sleep he finds her digging through his stash of food for a pop-tart or a bottle of water, or sitting with her feet up and the blue glow of her cellphone illuminating her face and shining off her glasses. Now, she has just asked him how he got to this shitty little motel in this shitty little town, and he just told her. 

“But why? You had a nice place. Why go running halfway across the country to somewhere that you barely even know where you are?”

“I think,” he says, “it’s something to do with being a Jotun. I think it’s instinct, to find a safe place.”

“And what wasn’t safe about where you were? Come on, who’s gonna bust into the God of Mischief’s apartment? Sounds like a recipe for trouble to me.”

He almost laughs. But he knows who. He has nothing but enemies on this world. One of them is the father of his child. 

She sees his expression and makes a quick attempt to change the subject. “So what’s with the weather channel?” she asks.

“What?”

“You’ve had the TV turned to the weather channel the whole time.”

“I just like it,” he replies. It’s true. He had turned the channel there the first day and hadn’t changed it since. The endless swirl of satellite clouds and electric-green radar sweep of rain and airport condition reports from around the world. Temperatures and humidity and wind speeds. Elevator music turned almost inaudibly low. It’s incredibly boring and repetitive, and therefore comfortable. 

“Wait,” Darcy says suddenly. Loki looks at her, startled at the excitement in her voice. “I had a cat that did this once. She ran off one day and we didn’t see her for a week and a half, and then it turned out she’d sneaked into a neighbor’s garage and had her kittens there. So maybe it is instinct. You know, for Frost Giants.”

Loki narrows his eyes. “You’re comparing me to your pet cat?”

Darcy shrugs. “A little. And don’t take it that way. I mean, she had a safe place with us, too, but she had to go someplace where no one could find her because some part of her kitty brain said the only safe place is where nobody knows where she is. Anyway, it really sucked because we hadn’t meant to let her get pregnant—we’d just put off getting her fixed a little too long when there was apparently an irresistible tomcat in the neighborhood—and so then we had to find homes for the kittens. There was one that I wanted to keep because it was just the cutest little marmalade kitten you ever saw, but…”

Darcy is babbling and Loki appreciates it. Soon enough she is telling him about the time that the kitten got into a bag of flour that her friend who worked at a bakery had brought home and tracked it all over the house, but he is asleep before he finds out how the story ends. 

*

He awakens hours later to the smell of pancakes. 

“You need real food,” Darcy says. “Or at least real carryout. The diner down the street boxed it up for us.”

He lets her nudge him out of the bed and sits next to her at the little round wooden table while she pulls warm Styrofoam boxes out of a plastic bag and sets one in front of him along with a plastic knife and fork. He has to admit, the pancakes do taste good.

“Thank you for coming to my aid, Darcy,” he says after a few minutes, during a lull in chewing. He is truly grateful to her, for being there with him, yes, but more importantly for being someone with whom he does not have to hide behind his usual cold walls of deception, trickery, and lies. He had practically forgotten what that was like. 

“Don’t mention it,” she replies, swirling a scrap of sausage around in a puddle of maple syrup and melted butter. 

A little while later, when he has returned to the bed and she has returned to her armchair after shoving the remains of their meal in the trash can, she speaks again, hesitantly.

“Can I ask you something, Loki?”

“All right,” he says, with eyes half-closed.

“Does your brother know about this?”

Loki sighs. “No, he does not. Nor do I want him to.”

Darcy seems to accept this answer, and she plays on her phone to let him rest for a while. He lies there with his eyes shut but finds it difficult to sleep. The child stirs. He wishes it would accede to being born already. 

*


	4. Chapter 4

The birth begins with pain. He has drifted into a grayness, halfway between waking and dreaming, a haze of blue light and dark shadows and faint elevator music and the soft plinking of cellphone keys, when his body is seized by pain and pressure, a vice squeezing him about his middle, and he comes to with a whimper. Darcy is suddenly at his side, her hand on his arm, fingers tentative and nervous.

“Are you okay? Loki, what’s going on?”

He opens his mouth to answer but the pain chooses that moment to intensify, and he bites down on it, squeezing his eyes shut. 

When it lessens after a minute or so, a thought comes unbidden to his mind and he is too pain-stunned to hold back the words. “My mother, Frigga, sometimes told tales of my birth and my brother’s birth. She claimed that while Thor, ever-impatient, emerged some days early, his birth was a difficult thing, and that I on the other hand was born late but with ease. She used this to calm me when my elder brother exceeded my abilities—you are younger, you are the one who came late, she would say, but you will catch up, and he will always be fighting with the world, while you will learn to go with it. It was all lies, of course, however well-meant. I wonder what my true mother, the one who birthed me, went through. I was so small it cannot have been painful. It must have been exceedingly easy, except that I was born in the midst of war, in the midst of destruction, in the midst of chaos. Fittingly enough.” He says all this in practically a single bitter breath, and his eyes gleam in the dim light.

Darcy reaches for his hand and clasps it in hers. “You’ll be all right, Loki,” she says, not really knowing what to say but trying to sound reassuring. “This will all be over soon, and your baby will be fine, and everything will go back to normal.” Even as she says it, she realizes how silly it sounds. She’s beginning to get the idea that things haven’t been normal for Loki for a long time, and that this isn’t going to help matters. 

Loki laughs softly until the pain grips him again, taking his breath away. 

*

The day passes in long moments of agony and longer periods of relief. Between contractions, when he is not resting, Darcy attempts to distract him from a mood that is growing darker and more racked with tension with each passing hour—when he stares off into space, it reminds her of the way people look at funerals, like bereft and in shock and just totally lost. Or maybe like he hadn’t slept in a month.2

The look intensifies when he presses a tentative hand to his belly. She thinks it has to be mostly because of the pain, but if she was in his shoes she'd be scared as hell, so she tries to be cheerful and helpful and generally at least not make things worse. She offers to rearrange his nest of pillows when he gets uncomfortable and gets him to drink water even if he doesn’t want to eat anything. She watches him not-really-watch the weather channel and she tries to think of things to talk about that don’t have anything to do with anything. She brings up obscure points of poli-sci theory from her classes and talks about old cartoons she used to watch as a kid, except she has to remember that maybe even Mighty Mouse, as a rodent superhero, might have some unfortunate associations for him. 

She studies him, or as much as she can since he’s wrapped in a bathrobe and bundled up under the blankets. The bulge of his belly, though, is obvious enough, and it’s a strange thing to see: if you can get past the blue-skinned, red-eyed thing, he still looks pretty much like Loki, and she never thought she would see Loki (who she still can't get over thinking of as Thor's evil brother with the weird but kinda awesome taste in helmets) hugely pregnant and lying around on a motel bed. But now that she’s here with him, she actually feels sort of honored that he called her. She strokes sweat-damp dark hair back from the cold blue skin of his forehead and tries to remember every stupid medical drama she ever watched that had a pregnant-lady episode, just in case she has to actually do something. She tries not to wonder what kind of equipment Frost Giants have and just hopes she won’t come out of this experience scarred for life. 

“Look at that,” Loki says suddenly, emerging from the depths of another bout of pain. His voice is dazed, but his eyes are fixed on the TV screen, where a freak storm has just popped up over New York, appearing as a splotch of angry orangey-red on the radar sweep. “Isn’t that strange?”

“Kinda,” she says, and when he nods off she checks the news on her phone. Yup. Some sort of ruckus with the Avengers fighting a new villain, the local weatherman complaining about his forecasts being right except when Thor’s in town, some damage from cars being tossed around in hurricane winds, the usual. She wonders whether she ought to even tell Loki about it.

She probably shouldn’t be surprised when he opens one eye and asks what she found out. 

“The news says the Avengers are to blame for the storm, but everyone’s okay. Just some property damage.”

Loki lets out a breath of obvious relief, turns it into a vaguely wicked laugh. She’s pretty sure he knows he’s not fooling anyone. 

“I used to love storms,” he says after a pause. “Thunder and lightning and good, pounding rain. Made me feel alive.”

Darcy nods. “Yeah, me too.”

*

2. _She met a guy like that once in San Francisco, or at least saw him talking to a streetlight and thought he was talking to her for a minute. Amphetamines are terrible things._


	5. Chapter 5

The next contraction is the worst yet, and by far the longest. Darcy holds Loki’s hand, and he squeezes hers almost painfully in return, and he squirms and seems to go away, his eyes distant, his breaths shallow and rasping and building to a long, low cry. When it ends, there are tears on his cheeks.

As his breathing slows, he stares at the orange splotch on the TV screen. “I didn’t expect this to happen,” he whispers with a shaky breath, “and I can’t say it will make my life any easier. But I would still have…”

Darcy doesn’t think he’s talking to her, but she nods along anyway. She knows what that’s like. She’s made her own mistakes in her love life, and she guesses there’s nothing wrong with being sadder but wiser, especially if you had fun getting there. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.

His eyes, dark lashes still wet, sweep over her. “It is complicated,” he says, haltingly. “And that is the only thing that I would have otherwise. I would have it be un-complicated. I would have it so that the father of this child could know of it, and so that I would not have to worry for its future, and so that I did not have to…”

Loki trails off, and Darcy tries to supply an ending. “Lie about it? Hide it?”

He shrugs a little under his blankets.

“Are you sure you have to be that worried?” she says. “Things never turn out as bad as you expect. Maybe if you just came out with it, you’d look back on all this and wonder why you ever waited so long and freaked out about it so much.”

“I doubt it.”

“What could be so terrible, though?”

He just looks at her, his expression blank. She reminds herself to never play poker with him. 

And then she starts to think about who Loki could have boned that he wouldn’t be able to talk to about this whole being-knocked-up thing—although when she thinks of it that way, she has to admit that the answer would probably be just about anyone. But he’s a trickster god. Surely confronting someone with a surprise baby wouldn’t, in itself, freak him out too much. He’d probably consider it a job well done. So there had to be more to it. Like, someone he shouldn’t be with and couldn’t normally talk to at all, like maybe one of the Aveng—oh. _Oh._

Loki is still watching the bloom of flame-color on the radar sweep, his face full of sadness and longing. It’s pretty obvious to anyone that the guy is obsessed. And they did get up to some crazy things in mythology if she remembered the couple of electives she’d taken a couple years ago correctly. 

She doesn’t say anything more. Now is not the time, especially not when Loki’s eyes are going wide with the start of another contraction. 

*


	6. Chapter 6

By the time night falls, the pain is ceaseless and Loki’s body involuntarily tenses in the attempt to push out the infant. His face contorts with agony and his throat spills with cries and animal moans and gasping breaths and he writhes against the pain, against the overpowering sensation of motion within him. In the middle of it all he tugs his hand away defensively from Darcy and clasps it to his abdomen. He feels a sudden desire to be alone again, to have no one see him in this state, but he does not let himself order her away. He is glad she is there. He is glad of the coolness of the room against his skin. He is glad that he is...

He feels suddenly light-headed and he barely hears Darcy’s frantic voice saying “Okay, uh, what am I supposed to do now?” He finds himself thinking of the generations of Jotun who gave birth alone in ice caves and how he has done this before himself, though it was different then and he was different then and he was not in a dim-lit motel room in New Mexico then, and he tries to rely on what comes naturally. To be completely honest with himself, it doesn’t help much. He pushes. He feels agony, and cries out with it, and he feels Darcy’s shaking hand against his forehead, and after what feels like an eternity, it is over, and he hears a tiny cry.

Darcy helps him gather up the newborn and clean it and wrap it in swaddling, and she helps him deal with the cord, and then he can do nothing more than rest and breathe, with the wailing infant bundled on his chest. He realizes then that Darcy is crying, and that he is crying also. 

Before he sleeps, Loki notices that the child, half-Jotun and half-Aesir, has garnet-red eyes and a dusting of golden hair on the top of his head, and he realizes that he has not given a single thought to what to name him. 

*

When the sun rises, Darcy wakes up stiff and sore from sleeping in the stupid armchair. The place looks like even more of a disaster area than it had before, and she putters around as quietly as she can cleaning up a little and trying to get her thoughts in order. She picks up the towels and sheets, stained with blood and fluids, that Loki had kicked off the end of the bed and throws them unceremoniously into the bathtub for lack of a better place. Then she washes up in the sink and tries to get a pot of coffee going. When she returns to the main room, Loki and the baby are both still soundly asleep on the bed, and the baby looks angelic as hell. Loki, maybe a little less so, she thinks, though—what’s that cliché she always hears?—he does kinda glow. He told her briefly yesterday, before labor started, about his previous experiences giving birth, and she thinks maybe she should tease him a little about being suited to motherhood. Or maybe not, she thinks, remembering her little deduction about the likely baby daddy. 

She wonders whether she ought to give Jane a call. Jane knows how to get ahold of Thor, and she might even be able to figure out a way to break that kind of news to him without him blowing a gasket… wait, that was a terrible idea. Loki would probably kill her if she did it, and she had promised him she wouldn’t tell anyone, though she hadn’t known _what_ she was promising not to tell anyone about at that point. 

Then, as she looks over him, she has a sudden flash of realization that she is completely out of her depth and how strange this situation really is. Not because he’s not human, really, and not even because he’s a guy and he just gave birth, but because he’s ancient in a weird sense and he’s out of place here in a way she can’t even explain, and he’s broken in a way she can’t even grasp. As she looks at his sleeping face, eyes softly shut and mouth hanging slightly open, she notices the faint scars on the edges of his lips, pale against the blue, and she remembers reading about that after Thor showed up in her life and she got curious about all that Norse stuff, and she remembers feeling horrified on Loki’s behalf (even though she’s had friends with lip piercings; it’s hardly the same) and thinking it was pretty harsh, really, for what he’d done. In the stories, Thor was the one that did that to him. And that’s just the obvious scars. Yet if she’s right, he’s lying there asleep and recuperating from having Thor’s baby. She doesn’t even know where to begin to start on how messed up that is. (Because really, if anyone ever sewed her mouth shut? Doesn't matter how good they are in the sack, that would kinda be the end of any chance they'd ever had. Seriously.) 

By the time he wakes up, she has firmly decided to let him decide who to tell what to and when. It’s none of her business, anyway. 

One night of sleep has clearly done him good, though, because when he wakes, he is smiling and bright-eyed, and after a moment of stretching and yawning his skin goes pale and pink and the red washes out of his eyes and he looks human (well, Aesir) again. He gathers his infant son in his arms, somehow managing not to wake him. 

“Good morning,” Darcy mouths at him silently, still futzing with the little in-room coffee machine. 

He nods in reply then turns his gaze to the tiny form he holds. He can’t seem to stop smiling. With one finger, he smooths the silk of blond hair across the baby’s head and bends to kiss the place his finger touched. 

“He is rather perfect, isn’t he?” Loki whispers. 

Darcy approaches and gives Loki’s shoulder a supportive squeeze. “Sure is. Is his daddy blond?” she asks innocently.

Loki flashes a smile at her but says nothing. 

*


	7. Chapter 7

They part ways later that day. Loki assures her that it does not take Jotun long to recover from childbirth, especially not if they have magic at their disposal. He is starting to feel like himself again, and certainly she will want to return to her own home and sleep in a real bed. He thanks her, with a tiny nod of a bow.

“Sure thing. I wouldn’t have missed it; I mean, hey, how many times do you get a chance to help a god have his baby in a crappy motel room?” She laughs a little, but then sees the seriousness of his expression and opens her arms to offer him a hug. “I hope it did help. It’s not like I really knew what I was doing, but I’m glad you came through it okay, Loki,” she adds, speaking against his shoulder. “And the baby is adorable.”

He pulls back and looks at her solemnly. “It did, very much. It was good to have the company. You have my gratitude, Darcy.”

As she climbs into her piece of shit car and pulls out of the gravely lot, she wonders (not for the first time) why she was the one he trusted with this, and whether the next time she hears from him there will be any acknowledgment of these couple of days, or whether everything will go back to the way it was. Whether she’ll ever get frantic calls asking if she can babysit (and she’ll totally do it if he drops ten grand in her bank account again. She has a price and she’s not ashamed to admit it). Whether she’ll be able to meet Thor’s gaze next time she sees him. That’s a thought that she can’t really get a handle on yet, even though she knows they’re not actually related (although they did grow up together), and some things are probably just different when you’re an immortal Asgardian god. Like morality and birth control. One thing’s for sure: it’s going to be awkward. 

*

He watches her go, and the part of him that is no longer washed with birthing hormones wonders what it was indeed that made him trust her. He had gone so far to escape from everyone who might have done him or the infant any harm, yet once he’d found his place of safety he had invited someone into it. He remembered the feeling of that urge to seek solitude, a pull like a knife-point scrape on the back of the neck, raising gooseflesh and blotting out all other thought, and he remembered the relief he’d felt when Darcy arrived. He could not have his family there, but at least it was a tenuous connection, and it had comforted him. At the thought of family—someday he will have to send word to Frigga, who would surely be glad for him no matter what has passed between him and the rest of them. And someday Thor will find out, and Loki will, as they say, cross that bridge when he comes to it,3 deal with his brother’s anger and hurt and whatever else he feels, and he will not be ashamed, because he knows that it could have been no other way. They are not partners. They are brothers and enemies and lovers and they have tried to kill one another more times than he can count and he certainly does not trust him any more than he expects to be trusted. That is simply how it is. 

The infant cries, and he draws away from the window to attend to its needs. 

In a few days he will undo the journey. For now he is still recovering his strength, and he has not yet thought of a name, and he wishes only to nestle into the mass of pillows on the bed and rest and feel his child’s soft heartbeat against his. But in a few days he will go, with his new son he will return to the place he has made his home, and he will raise the child, and he will be the architect of mischief and chaos once more, taunting the Avengers and scheming against his temporary allies and his old enemies alike and, yes, finding some amusing way to use his prolonged absence to his advantage. He will do all this because this is not the first time, and while the place is different and the age is different and he is different, there are some things that do not change. 

He turns the television back on, tunes it to the weather channel, and wonders whether it is raining in New York.

***

3. _It has taken a while for him to reach the point of using bridge-related metaphors again. It’s a step in the right direction._


End file.
